1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a control system for controlling manufacturing equipment such as equipment for manufacturing semiconductor devices and equipment for manufacturing liquid crystal panels, for example, and relates more particularly to a control system having a function for integrally managing a plurality of substrate processing units.
2. Discussion of the Background
In recent years, along with large-scaled systems for processing semiconductor wafers and liquid crystal panels, there has been an increasing demand for integrally managing a number of manufacturing units for performing various types of processing to substrates, such as a CVD processing, a sputtering processing, an etching processing, a thermal oxide processing, etc.
According to a conventional control system having a function for integrally managing a plurality of processing units, the processing units for performing various processing to a substrate are controlled individually by an ECC (Equipment Controller Concept) controller. The ECC controller has an HCI (Host Communication Interface) as a logical interface with a host computer, and various data transactions with the host computer are carried out through a data transmission system such as TCP/IP or the like by this HCI. The host computer performs a tracking processing of various processing units through various data transactions with the ECC controller of each processing unit, stores process data received from each processing unit as hysteresis in a data base, stores this content in a monitor, and performs correction of various parameters and detection of abnormal conditions of the processing units based on this data base.
At the time of a process data transfer from the ECC controller of each processing unit to the host computer, the HCI selects only one part of minimum required data for the tracking processing, parameter correction and abnormality detection from the whole process data generated by the ECC controller, and then transmits this selected data to the host computer.
According to the integral management system based on this control system, however, the process data stored in the host computer is limited and information obtainable from the process data displayed in the monitor as a status of various processing units is also limited. Further, in many cases, changes of process data reflecting secular deterioration status of characteristics of the processing units cannot be detected by simply referring to the process data displayed in the monitor. Under these circumstances, it has been practically difficult to detect securely and at an early stage abnormalities and characteristic deterioration of the processing units.